(August 2004)
Remembering three million Vietnamese.
In july 1964 the
U.S.S. Maddox, a destroyer of the United States Navy, was patrolling the gulf coast seeking reconnaissance about the North Vietnamese. president Lyndon Johnson ordered illegal, covert operations in the gulf of Tonkin against the North Vietnam. When the Vietnamese retaliated by shooting torpedoes to the American warships, Johnson declared that a new Pearl Harbour had occurred: the communists of Vietnam had attacked harmless American ships. That caused an outrage in the USA, and eventually led Congress on 7 August 1964 to pass the
the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution", which authorized president Johnson to bomb
Vietnam (which he had already ordered anyway).
Johnson had deliberately fabricated a gigantic lie.
Three million Vietnamese (mostly civilians) and 30,000 USA soldiers lost their
lives in a war that lasted ten years.
It was a disgrace from all points of view, not only because it was the first
war lost by the USA.
The USA used weapons of mass destruction (the same weapons that Saddam Hussein
used against the Kurds).
The USA supported a ruthless puppet regime in South Vietnam that was despised
by the population.
In 1965, unbeknown to the American people, Johnson ordered a secret bombing campaign of Laos, a peaceful state that bordered on Vietnam. In 1969, the new US
president, Richard Nixon, ordered a land invasion of Cambodia. These presidents
consistently lied to the American people. Nixon swore he would never conduct
the bombing of Cambodia while he had just ordered it. Nixon ordered the carpet
bombing of North Vietnam's rice fields knowing that only women and children were
in those fields. Those rice fields are still dotted with thousands of graves.
USA soldiers are blamed for hundreds of massacres, the most famous of which (but not the only one) is 1968's rape and extermination of unarmed women and children at My Lai.
It was a wrong war. It was also wrong because it was based on a wrong theory:
if Vietnam falls, the whole of Asia will become a Soviet colony.
Guess what: Vietnam fell, and the first thing they did was kick out the Soviet Union. A few years later they even fought a war against communist China.
The only countries that became communist were the countries that the USA
involved in the conflict (Cambodia and Laos). The domino theory was so wrong
that today we believe communism began to collapse the day it won the war:
people rallied around their communist leaders only because they were fighting
against a foreign invasion.
It was also wrong because France had promised Vietnam independence for its
help against Japan, but, at the end of the war, France refused to recognize
Vietnam's independence: the Vietnamese had been cheated by the French.
The USA inherited what was originally an independence war. The USA failed
to recognize that the Vietnamese people did not want another invasion and
certainly did not want the government left by the French.
It is time to apologize. The USA should publicly admit that it was the
aggressor, and that it committed atrocities comparable to those of Saddam
Hussein. Then it should impeach both Johnson and Nixon posthumously and remove
their names from all the records. That would serve to keep future presidents
from committing the same crimes against humankind and against the American
people. Finally, the USA should pay compensation to the Vietnamese families
that lost civilians in the bombings of North Vietnamese cities and rice fields.
It is about time that the USA learns to say "I am sorry".

(January 2000)
America's apologies to Vietnam are overdue.
Vietnam is now open to tourists and every American can go and see for himself
what America fought against. The Vietnamese people hold no grudges against
Americans, but they do wonder what the word "justice" means in America.
Monuments scattered around Vietnam and, worse, the
accounts of the elederly tell a story of senseless destruction and a million
civilian casualties (mostly women and children). Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon have never been indicted by any court, but the sheer amount of lies and the hideous bombings they ordered on civilian areas and the widespread use
of chemical weapons and landmines make Milosevic look like an amateur.
One wonders how can America claim that Serb militiamen are war criminals when so
many American soldiers who committed atrocities in Vietnam have never been
tried by any court (William calley, the butcher of My Lay who personally killed
109 people there, plus supervising the rape of children and sodomization of
women, spent only 3 years in prison) and are living free in their wealthy
country while the
relatives of their victims are still mourning.
Every single foreigner I met in Indochina asked me the same quesion: why in
heaven did America invaded Vietnam and why did America need to kill
so many innocents?
It was a mixture of stupidity and cruelty: Eisenhower's "domino theory" was
false (Vietnam did fall, but communism did not spread and no harm came to the
rest of the world) and president Johnson and Nixon were simply sadistic animals.
Isn't it time that the US president apologizes to Vietnam the same way that
German and Japanese prime ministers apologized to the victims of their
invasions? Isn't it time that America repays the astronomical amount of damage
caused to the people of Indochina by helping rebuild the thousands of roads,
bridges, factories, schools, hospitals, farms and houses that were destroyed
by Johnson's and Nixon's bombs?
The Republicans have proposed a tax cut so that wealthy Americans can get a
little wealthier: why not give those trillion dollars to the Vietnamese, whose
average income has been reduced to $100 a week thanks to 10 years of bombing
and 30 years of sanctions?
Let's face it once and for all: we fought and unjust, unwarranted, cruel war,
we killed scores of innocents, and we lost the war.
Our presidents lied to us, day after day: Vietnam never attacked American
interests, the Vietnamese government had no desire to spread communism abroad,
the people of Vietnam were massively in favor of Ho Chi Min, etc.
And, please, let's stop this ridicolous search for MIAs: Vietnam has 300,000
MIAs and we have no interest in raising the subject (there are still horror
stories of US concentration camps from which no prisoner survived).
Why continue lying to ourselves, to the new generations,
and to the rest of the world?